[Lingtyp] Explicating morpheme boundaries

[Joe Blythe]

Dear typologists,
I’d like some help please coming up with a better rule of thumb for explicating morpheme boundaries to students. I teach a third year undergraduate morphosyntax unit. When beginning with orthodox agglutinative morphology, I usually give my students a kind of rule of thumb, that when presented with a particular problem set, they should generally allocate as much phonological material as possible to the root (or stem), and the remainder can be allocated to an affix. I don’t recall where I learned this, but it always seemed to me the sensible thing to do. Whether it is justified I’m not so sure. There are however occasions when it seems sensible to ensure that an affix contains at least a vowel. Yet there are certainly some affixes that lack a nucleus (the examples I’m thinking of are all suffixes). So rightly or wrongly, I have two guiding principles here that are pushing in opposite directions. And there are always a few students who get all the glosses correct but have carved the joints differently. These solutions look odd to me but I struggle to explain why I find them unsatisfactory. Now for every language it is usually possible determine where to carve the joints, given enough data. But when presented with a small dataset for some random language (perhaps without even a name), how should we explain why prefixes generally need vowels? Actually, is this last point even true? I feel these issues has probably been discussed somewhere at length. If so, can you point me to some relevant literature, as I’d like to provide some advice that’s typologically grounded, not on what feels like the right thing to do.
All the best
Joe

Joe Blythe
Associate Professor | Department of Linguistics | Macquarie University
Room 514, 12 Second Way, North Ryde, NSW 2109, Australia
Vice President (Conferences), Australian Linguistic Society

joe.blythe at mq.edu.au  |  www<https://researchers.mq.edu.au/en/persons/joe-blythe>
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